Mehreen Ali Shah, 48, was driving home from a popular Karachi restaurant, Kolachi, on the night of August 4.

The restaurant is by the sea and has increasingly become popular of late and is a favourite especially with the city’s affluent residents.

Karachi’s Kolachi restaurant

Friends and well-wishers say that she was returning home from the restaurant and was driving on Khayaban-e-Shaheen, a major artery in Karachi’s traffic

The daughter of one of Karachi’s top doctors, Dr Naveed Shah (who runs a thriving hospital on Burnes Road near Regal Chowk), she was said to be a benefactor of a local school, in a tweet by PTI MNA Dr Arif Alvi (incidentally he is an MNA for the area where the tragic incident took place).

Our friend & a major donor of RailwaySchool Mehreen Shah was killed yesterday in a mugging at Mai Kolachi.My condolnces 2 family.May she RIP

According to an obituary notice published in Dawn, her funeral was to be held on the evening of August 5. One of her sisters Dr Mehnaz Naveed Shah is a leading ophthalmologist in Karachi and heads the Eye Centre at the South City Hospital in Clifton.

Mehreen Ali Shah’s obituary notice published in the newspaper of August 5

Mehreen Shah shot dead during mobile snatching near Kolachi, when terrorists run free, thieves Kill & get away with it #CleanKarachi

The incident, the details of which remain sketchy, happened on a major thoroughfare in one of Karachi’s most affluent neighbourhoods.

Local residents, many of whom were worried and saddened by this turn of events, said that driving on many of DHA roads, particularly during the night, had become unsafe and that several incidents of mugging at traffic signals had occurred in recent months.

They said that some of the especially bigger roads linking Phases 5 and 6 with Phase 8 had seen several muggings, especially at traffic lights, and that some of these happened even before the night.

Several residents said that they themselves had been on the receiving end of such muggings and that in most cases they did not bother reporting the theft to the police because they didn’t expect the police to do much about it.